The Breitbart writer, who previously appointed himself a star of the digital trash fire known as “Gamergate”, has been a peddler of inarguable hate speech. Beyond just speech, though, he’s cannily built smear campaigns that incited his followers to dogpile other users, usually women and people of color, until the targets could no longer use social media constructively.

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Only those users who live at the bizarre intersection of anime fandom, Donald Trump, and intentionally “edgy” neoconservative meme dumps are sad to see Yiannopoulos go.

I’m enjoying gloating as much as anyone: back when I was working in video games and acted as an outspoken critic of some of geek culture’s toxic boys-club attitudes, Yiannopoulos helped lead a charge aimed at humiliating me into silence and hounding me out of my job. He published demeaning and spiteful hit pieces about me on Breitbart and encouraged his followers to petition my employers’ advertisers – a tactic that briefly worked, until it didn’t.

For at least a year, young men who’d been convinced my feminist video game writings were some kind of grand threat to free speech felt emboldened, appearing at my speaking engagements and posting my every move on creepy Reddit threads.

Milo is now a martyr for ‘free speech’

Of course I’m glad that Twitter will no longer allow such a person to use its platform in this way. I took pleasure in watching Yiannopoulos throw a tantrum when Twitter first rescinded his blue verification tick, and I take a spiteful pleasure in seeing him banned like a kid sent to the naughty step today. But I know my spite is not constructive: this celebration is at best premature and at worst short-sighted.

Banning one man won’t undo the small but poisonous cultural legacy he’s created, nor erase the playbook for defamation and harassment online that he’s played a key role in scripting. Twitter has far, far more work to do.

Without this further work, Yiannopoulos’s ban – and even the subsequent catty gloating from us folks on the left – all just stands to aggravate a wound that’s been attracting flies to social media discourse for too long already. An isolated ban just lets Yiannopoulos make himself a martyr for “free speech” – it enables him to argue that social media offers special treatment to those on the political left that it does not accord the right, and perpetuates the pernicious myth that the main interest of the progressive left is in shutting its ears to offensive things or in “censoring” those who ruffle feathers.

Leslie Jones’s Google results are led by stories of her harassment, not her theatrical success, and may be for some time

Lots of people, even those on the left, would argue that even hateful speech deserves the opportunity to have a platform – when others have the choice not to listen. Although Twitter’s definition of what constitutes one user’s abuse of another on its service is famously whimsical, and its crude block and mute tools still put the onus on individuals to ensure their own good experience, users do generally have some control over what they are exposed to.

Like many women targeted during Gamergate and its associated campaigns I use an auto-blocker, which pre-emptively blocks users as a group based on certain criteria. For example, I can automatically block all followers of Yiannopoulos. They can still tweet whatever they like to me or to anyone else. I just don’t have to see it.

But when it comes to abuse campaigns like the ones leveraged at me or my colleagues, or most recently at Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones – Yiannopoulos’ involvement in targeting Jones is thought to have directly led to his ban – we tend to miss the fact that more than mere “speech” is involved. These campaigns are more than harmless self-expression of differing views – they are waged specifically with the intention to manipulate or damage the target’s public image, to push them into abandoning the platform as Jones did, or to frighten them into silence with threats worded just so that they’re creepy but not actionable.

The harm can be long-term, too – Jones’s Google results are now led by stories of her harassment, not of her theatrical success, and they may be for some time. Lots of women who’ve been targeted still find that hit pieces and slanderous abuse sites are among the first things to come up when they search for their name. I’ve stopped searching for my own. For women or people of color who work in more conservative, less tech-savvy industries, this state of affairs can be genuinely destructive to their future opportunities.

Is Milo the victim?

Trying to make it look as if the target deserves abuse is a classic far-right tactic Yiannopoulos has been instrumental in helping create – the mobs dig into a target’s personal life, family relationships, old online profiles and more to find any snippet of information, however stripped of context, that could isolate the target and prohibit sympathy. For example, when a writer I had worked with was critical of Yiannopoulos and his “movement”, they responded by digging up childhood chat logs they could use to make her look as though she were a pedophile. Their goal was not to express themselves through speech; their goal was to remove her support network and to get her employers to distance themselves from her.

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This is a key distinction. In the case of Jones, Yiannopoulos disseminated fake tweet screencaps purporting to be from the actress wherein she expressed antisemitic views, for the purpose of rationalizing further racist abuse from his followers. But while he’s clearly played a key role in building and perpetuating these silencing tactics, he did not invent them, and other hate mobs on Twitter are free to continue borrowing these strategies again and again.

It’s actually not that hard to see why Yiannopoulos is an icon for a certain gleeful, anarchic base who finds the language of progressivism alienating. He is gay but homophobic; he is antisemitic but appears to claimJewishheritage when it suits him; he despises feminism but once published a poetry chapbook about his childhood trauma which borrowed heavily from Tori Amos song lyrics. It’s a neat trick that lets Milo and his ilk accuse detractors of being the ones who are really trying to suppress gay voices when they criticize him.

Beyond that, Yiannopoulos’s public performances promise his fans that you can have traits perceived to confer sociopolitical disadvantage yet still be part of a supposedly wealthy, unflappable elite; his identity factors let him market a kind of old-fashioned idea of power to other people who feel disenfranchised. It’s no coincidence that the first seeds of his wild fanbase were sown in video game culture, among young men who felt threatened by the perceived intrusion of progressive politics into their private, escapist power fantasies.

Male gamers felt threatened by perceived intrusion of progressive politics into their private, escapist power fantasies

In light of that, I suppose my gloating about Yiannopoulos’s ban is not constructive; it stands only to further wind up people who respond to humiliation by becoming dangerous. And by banning Yiannopoulos, Twitter has probably only strengthened him: this is the grand epilogue to the neocon digital playbook, when you can develop and perfect strategies aimed to create actual personal and professional consequences for people – then crown it all with a story of how you are the real victim, disallowed from speaking up for yourself by draconian liberals “too sensitive” for your brand of “humor”.

What about everyday users?

Twitter has been struggling massively with the consequences of its refusal to provide sufficient curatorial tools to its users, and of its refusal to act on abuse. This struggle is revealed starkly in its metrics these days, a pragmatic issue that may have played a role in its decision to finally act, weakly, against this one user in this one very high-profile case.

But what about the everyday users, who aren’t famous and highly visible actors? What about the black activists, particularly black women, whose every day on the service is a minefield? What about LGBTQ users who face the very real threat of having the dialogue around their identity wrestled away by abusers? They have not been made safer in any way by the removal of one toxic person. In fact, they may be less safe from users galvanized by the supposed threat of “censorship” suggested by Yiannopoulos’s ban.

What Twitter must do instead – and soon, for its own viability as a platform as well as for the safety of its users – is undergo policy revisions that act not necessarily on speech, where the plot tends to get lost, but on specific behaviors used in abuse campaigns. For example, it should be a bannable offense to edit and promote fake tweets for the purpose of causing another user harm. What about Twitter users who disseminate others’ personal information for the purpose of harassing them, whether that’s something actionable – like a phone number – or softer, like an old diary?

Yiannopoulos may be gone, but the strategies of abuse created by the far right will be used again and again. Whomever Twitter bans will leave loyal soldiers in his wake, so it’s time for some actual ingenuity and new terms of service. What people like Yiannopoulos say might make them vile to some, true, but it’s what they do on Twitter, and the way the platform enables their viral behavior, that needs addressing the most.

• This article was amended on 21 July 2016 to clarify a reference to Milo Yiannopoulos’s Jewish heritage.